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Fear management and the Mourne perspective

We were forwarded a link to a Times On Line publication today entitled ‘How to forget fear’. You can click here, as we have posted the full article on our site. Having read through the article, it highlights the neuroscience studies around chemical intervention on phobic type memories. The article implies that this is new science, and that, with the right (chemical) intervention, an individual can ‘re-write’ scary memories.

As always, there is no reference to any other work relating to re-writing, re-imprinting or scrambling unwanted or unuseful memories. We seem to recall that a guy by the name of Richard Bandler came up with a technique that provided similar results – all be it without the introduction of chemicals. Dr Bandler had noticed the way traditional therapy dealt with phobias was by trying to establish Why a person had a phobia, and then attempted to “Desensitise” the phobic reaction. This was (and is) typically by making a person face the situation that caused the reaction again and again. Bandler also noticed that the success of this type of intervention was not great.

By using NLP, Bandler modelled those who did have a phobia, but had managed to get over it. He was looking to identify what they did differently that enabled them to stop having the severe reaction. Eventually he arrived at a model of the thoughts and behaviours or characteristics that was common amongst this group, and then developed and refined the technique that became known as the “NLP Fast Phobia Cure”.

This technique was field tested on hundreds of people with phobias, with positive results. Instead of taking many sessions to desensitise the phobic, sometimes with drugs, Bandler was achieving success in as little as one session. This technique has been part of the classic training in NLP, and so many NLpers have helped many thousands of people around the world to overcome phobias of Flying, Confined Spaces, Spiders, Snakes, Lifts and Elevators, Public Speaking, Crowds, Driving and many others. We, at Mourne, have had major successes using this technique, some of which are highlighted on the Testimonials page. Once again, it would seem that science is catching up with and validating where NLP has been.